Ang Unang Bulaklak

The sampaguita hedge at the Villareal house has flowered every June for ninety years, and every June, on the first morning of blooming, it gives something back. The family does not find this remarkable. Families never find their own impossibilities remarkable; that is what makes them families and not case studies.

The returns are small and exact. A hair comb, buried 1953, returned 1961, teeth intact, smelling of the perfume of a woman by then eight years abroad. A medal from the war that a great-uncle had buried "so it would stop looking at him," returned the June after he died, polished, as if to say: he is out of the room now, you may look at this again. A milk tooth. A letter, unopened, its seal somehow younger than its paper. The hedge has taste. It has never once returned money.

Marisol Villareal was twenty-six, home for the summer to help her mother pack up the house — the house was being sold, this is what the story is about, although nobody in it will say so for some chapters — when the hedge, three weeks early and out of season, put its first bloom out in May and left on the doorstep a small object wrapped in two leaves, tied with a blade of grass, addressed in no handwriting to no one.

Her mother saw it from the window and sat down slowly at the kitchen table, which in that house is what people do instead of screaming.

"Anak," she said, in the voice of a woman selecting each word from a drawer of sharper ones, "before you open that, I need to tell you what your Lola buried the year you were born. And then I need you to understand na hindi tayo nagbebenta ng bahay dahil kailangan natin ng pera." We are not selling the house because we need money.

Marisol, who had a return ticket for August and a life in another city arranged neatly around not knowing things like this, looked at the little leaf parcel on her palm. It weighed what a key weighs. The sampaguita by the gate stood there flowering out of season, ninety years old, patient as a relative, having started — in its polite and unanswerable way — the conversation the whole family had spent twenty-six years agreeing not to have.